sample issue

Juiced.GSA quarterly Apple II journal

Best of Juiced.GS Sample Issue

KansasFest 2009

Late nights, pizza parties, wandering from room to room, and hacking away —

It's KansasFest, where the Apple II is alive and well. Read our coverage on pages 8–12.

Insidethis issue ...

My

Home Page:A note from editor

Ken Gagne

Page 2

MicroDrive/

Turbo:CompactFlash

card review

Pages 3-5

Bob Bishop:Interview with

Apple R&D lab

co-founder

Pages 6-7

Juiced.GS Sample Issue Page 2

My Home Page

Welcome HomeWelcome to the sample issue of Juiced.GS!

This publication was founded by Max Jones in

1996. With other storied publications such as Nibble having ended their production runs, and other

attempts to fill that gap not realizing their potential,

Max determined a need within the Apple II community

for a regular publication that would bring its members

the latest news, reviews, interviews, and how-to's.

What you are holding is evidence that that need

still exists, and that Juiced.GS is still filling it. More

than a decade later, it is the longest-running Apple II

publication ever, and the only one still in print.

Despite the small number of people in this community, it is still big in its diversity and geography.

Members hail from the United States, the United

Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Japan, and elsewhere.

So it's unsurprising that sometimes news travels

slowly.

The existence and value of a publication like

Juiced.GS is something that's yet to be discovered by

all those members. This sample issue is intended to

rectify that, with three articles from our 2008 and 2009

volumes. The interview with Bob Bishop has been cut in half to fit here, while the MicroDrive/Turbo review

appears in full, though some pictures and tables were

cut. The KansasFest article covers the entire event but

without two sidebars that summarized announcements

made at the event.

These articles represent a small portion of what we

publish in each 20-page issue every three months. A

growing staff of writers and programmers diligently

work each issue to bring you news of upcoming

software and hardware releases, and in-depth, critical

reviews of same once they are available. Some programmers provide tutorial series to help you learn

the ins and outs of Apple programming; others give you

an inside perspective on how your favorite programs

came to be. Interviews with Apple II luminaries, past

and present–Mike Harvey of Nibble Magazine, Jeff Fink of Silvern Castle, Jason Scott of BBS: The

Documentary–give you the answers to the questions

you've always wanted to ask your favorite

programmers, publishers, documentarians, and more.

And first-hand coverage from every summer's KansasFest lets those of you unable to attend the

world's only Apple II convention vicariously experience

this unique affair.

Juiced.GS is a one-of-a-kind publication in the

modern Apple II community. Those who support it find that it brings an essential focal point to their retro-

computing hobby, while reminding them that the Apple

II is alive and well.

"I am just delighted with [Juiced.GS]–each issue

just has a ton of content," said Carrington Vanston in an episode of 1 MHz!, his Apple II podcast. "It's

exciting just to get an Apple II publication in 2006."

I hope that this sample issue will provide you with

a hint of the value that other Apple II enthusiasts have

found in Juiced.GS. Subscription and contact information is found on the facing page.

Ken GagneEditor-in-Chief


Review: MicroDrive/Turbo

MicroDrive/Turbo

$185 + shipping & handling

Developed by ///SHH Systeme and available from:

ReactiveMicro.com

http://www.reactivemicro.com/

By Mike Maginnis

It is a testament to the genius

of Woz's design that the Apple II's

architecture continues to be expanded more than thirty years

after its initial introduction.

Enterprising hackers have created

hardware to adapt technologies

such as Ethernet and CPU acceleration, and now, as prices on

solid-state media such as

CompactFlash continue to fall and

reliability improves, just such a

homebrew device finds new life in the Enhanced IIe and IIGS.

Meet the MicroDrive

The MicroDrive/Turbo

controller, developed by Joachim

Lange in the mid-1990's, is available now from

ReactiveMicro.com for $185 +

shipping & handling. While the

MicroDrive/Turbo was initially

designed to handle IDE hard drives—and handle them it still

does—today's Apple II technology

trends in mass storage lean

toward CompactFlash, which the

MD/T also accommodates. The MD/T now comes retrofitted with

everything you need to take

advantage of CompactFlash in

your Apple IIGS (ROM 01 or later)

or Enhanced IIe. Included in the package are a 3.5" ProDOS-

formatted 800K floppy containing

the Setup Utility, Driver, and

Hard Disk Utilities for the Apple

IIe and IIGS; a CD-ROM with both PDF manuals and a Quick CF

Card Setup guide; a Butterfly

Media Hi-Speed USB 2.0

CompactFlash Reader/Writer for

use with your PC or Mac; a

128MB preloaded CompactFlash card; and the MD/T itself.

The MicroDrive/Turbo comes

ready to run out of the box. Its

documentation suggests using

slots 2 or 7 on a IIGS, but any slot will do; for the IIe, no suggestions

are offered. A dual-slot CF-IDE

converter comes plugged into the

40-pin IDE connector on the main

circuit board and can be removed to connect other IDE devices to

the MD/T. A 128MB

CompactFlash card is plugged

into the converter's primary CF

slot and is pre-partitioned and formatted with four 32MB

ProDOS partitions. System 6.0.1

is already loaded on the first

partition, so you can simply plug

the MicroDrive/Turbo into your Apple. The 17-page PDF manual

boasts that the card can boot into

GS/OS in twelve seconds on a

standard IIGS, and nine seconds

with an accelerator present. My testing proved these numbers to

be accurate, as represented in

Table 1 (page 4). The MicroDrive/

Turbo booted a Kodak 128MB

CompactFlash card with four 32MB ProDOS partitions. A

default GS/OS installation was

loaded on the first partition of the

card.

Table 2 (page 5) represents my test of file-copy speed. Three

files were transferred 10 times

each from an 800K floppy to a

partition on a CF card on the MD/

T.

The MicroDrive/Turbo can

boot into any partition on the

attached device via a simple

keypress combination (Open-

Apple + partition number you want to boot from) during start

Best of

Juiced.GSPublisher:Gamebits

P.O. Box 703Leominster, MA

01453-0703

Editor:Ken Gagne

20 Elbridge StreetWorcester, MA

[email protected]

Associate Editor:Andrew Molloy

120 Stinard AvenueSyracuse, NY13207-1239

[email protected]

Juiced.GS is a quarterly magazine produced on

Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. Contents copyright 2010 by Gamebits. All rights

reserved.

2010 subscriptions available for $19 in the U.S.A., $26

elsewhere. Make checks payable in U.S. funds to Gamebits.

Credit cards welcome online through the Juiced.GS

Web site at:

http://www.juiced.gs/


up. This handy feature allows you

to load each partition with a

different OS or configuration and boot right into which ever one you

choose.

The CompactFlash card that

ReactiveMicro.com includes with

the device is loaded with useful software. System 6.0.1 is loaded on

the first partition, and the second

partition contains ShrinkIt v3.4, a

set of SCSI card utilities, Dsk2File

v5.8, Diskmaker.8, Block Warden, CVTech's MemTest, and Copy II

Plus 9.1, as well as drivers and

documentation for not only the MD/

T, but several other of

ReactiveMicro.com's product line.

The MicroDrive/Turbo partition

scheme is incompatible with Rich

Dreher's competing CompactFlash

For Apple II (CFFA) controller; a CF

card set up on one device will not work in the other.

Set up

Following the included

instructions to install a new CF

card for use with the MD/T is a multi-step process. The card must

be partitioned and formatted on the

MD/T using the included

INSTALL.SYSTEM utility. Then,

the card must be moved to a PC and the volume images on the CD

transferred to the card using

CiderPress (reviewed in Juiced.GS

Volume 12, Issue 4). There are four

32-megabyte volumes on the CD: one contains a default GS/OS

installation, another various GS/OS

patches, drivers and utilities. (These

are the same files included on the

preformatted CompactFlash disk that comes with the MD/T.) If you

are intending to use GS/OS with the

device, a system driver for the

MD/T must also be installed to

ensure you get the best possible performance from the controller.

The MD/T will still work without

the driver, but there is a noticeable

difference in speed when operating

without it. The two images for the IIe contain a similar setup: ProDOS

and various utilities in the first

volume and DOS MASTER, a

system for putting DOS 3.3

partitions on ProDOS volumes such as a hard disk or a 3.5" disk, on the

second.

This is the documented process

for installing a new CF card, but

you can install whatever images or operating systems you like. The

documentation briefly mentions

HFS partitions, but after noting the

limitations and unreliability of such

partitions on the IIGS, recommends against this file system. But HFS

was nonetheless easy enough to set

up: using the included setup utility,

a partition was created and then

formatted in GS/OS.

The MD/T supports two

partition schemes depending on the

number of devices you have

attached to the card. With the

default schema, a single volume of sixteen partitions is created; with

the other, two volumes of eight

partitions each are made. Again,

any of these can be booted

(assuming you install an operating system) with the Open-Apple key

press combination during start up.

Documentation

The included CD contains not

only the MicroDrive/Turbo Manual

in PDF format, but manuals and

documentation for everything ReactiveMicro currently sells, as

well as an extensive library of

scanned Apple II manuals, books,

reference files and even hardware

schematics. Most of these files are unrelated to the MicroDrive/Turbo.

Also on the CD is a library of disk

images containing software and

drivers for ReactiveMicro's product

line. Several of these are MicroDrive/Turbo volume images,

32MB in size and in ProDOS-order

format, and are designed to aid in

creating partitions on your physical

device; they are accompanied by a Microsoft Word file outlining

instructions for quickly setting up a

new CompactFlash device, and an

animated .GIF containing screen

captures of the actual creation process in CiderPress.

It should be noted that

following these instructions

requires the use of CiderPress, a

Windows-only application. Instructions for setting up a CF

card under Mac OS for use with the

MD/T are not included. CiderPress

and the image files included on the

CD are not required for successful setup, however, and are simply

included for the sake of

convenience. GS/OS can be

installed using the standard 3.5"

installation diskettes, once the CF card is properly partitioned with

the utility.

Table 1. Times are the average over ten trials of booting a CF volume.


Machine Speed GS/OS load time

2.8 MHz 11.6 seconds

10 MHz 9.0 seconds

13.75 MHz 8.1 seconds


Also on the CD is a copy of Andy

McFadden's excellent open-source

program, CiderPress. This is handy, as CiderPress is the premiere disk

image management program on the

Windows platform, and can by used

to transfer data directly to and from

your ProDOS or HFS-formatted CompactFlash card in a Microsoft

Windows environment.

It's clear that the

documentation and supporting

utilities were designed with hard disks in mind, not solid state

storage. The User Manual makes

no mention of CompactFlash cards,

and in fact they are only mentioned

in the Quick Setup instructions. The MD/T and its utilities,

however, have no problem with the

newer storage medium.

DMA

The MicroDrive/Turbo's in-credible speed on the IIGS is derived

from its DMA capability, which dis-

tinguishes it from the basic Mi-

croDrive controller, sans turbo.

DMA, or Direct Memory Access, is a

technology found in all modern, and many vintage computers, including

the Apple IIGS. DMA provides true

1:1 interleave by allowing the com-

puter's peripherals to interact di-

rectly with the system's memory, bypassing the CPU entirely. This

technique eliminates CPU over-

head, resulting in a significant

speed increase when accessing vol-

umes. But the correct DMA setting must be chosen for the controller, as

an incorrect DMA setting can lead

to data corruption. The MD/T setup

application allows you to choose

whether DMA is active and if so, which type to use (ROM 01 or ROM

03). Other options—"enable" and

"undefined" —are not so clear; the

manual, while addressing DMA in

depth, does not cover what these options mean.

MD/T and the IIe

As shipped, the MicroDrive/

Turbo is not compatible with any

model of the Apple IIe. When

ordering, you can specify that the

card will be used in a IIe, and for no extra charge, ReactiveMicro will

replace the card's firmware with a

version for the IIe. This firmware

essentially turns the MD/T into the

slower standard MicroDrive controller, at $50 more than the

actual basic MicroDrive. So if

you're looking for a mass storage

device for the IIe, stick with the

basic version of the MicroDrive, or check out Rich Dreher's CFFA

controller. The MD/T is incom-

patible with the other models of the

Apple II (II, II Plus, unenhanced IIe

and IIc).

In conclusion

The MD/T's ability to transpar-

ently handle CompactFlash cards is

a plus; as the medium has matured,

card capacity and reliability have increased roughly in sync with

Moore's Law. Additionally, as Serial

ATA becomes the standard hard

drive interface, IDE drives will be-

come less common and finding re-placements, more difficult and ex-

pensive. Add the ever-decreasing

price-per-gigabyte factor and the

fact that CompactFlash cards have

no moving parts to fail, and it makes little sense not to go this

route.

Overall, the MicroDrive/Turbo

was easy to set up and use out of

the box. Joachim Lange's installation utility made preparing

new CompactFlash cards simple,

and with CiderPress, transferring

data to and from my PC was a snap.

At $185 + s/h, the MD/T is not cheap—nearly double the price of

the competing CFFA, and $50 more

than the standard MicroDrive

controller—but its extra features

and especially the speed boost gained through DMA support, are

worth the additional cost.

Table 2. Times are the average of ten trials when accessing a CF card.

Machine Speed File Size File Transfer Time

2.8 MHz 25K 4 seconds

10 MHz 25K 3.2 seconds

13.75 MHz 25K 2.9 seconds




2.8 MHz 90K 6 seconds





MusinGS: Bob Bishop

R&D on the Apple FrontierFor Bishop, "Everything I needed was in the Apple II"

Bob Bishop, along with Steve Wozniak, co-founded

Apple Computer, Inc.'s R&D lab. Mr. Bishop wrote

the first video games for the nascent Apple II computer, and went on to develop groundbreaking

graphics routines that were utilized in such

diverse places as CBS Television's popular Tic Tac

Dough game show. He recently took time to talk

with Juiced.GS writer Mike Maginnis about those heady days and to fill us in on what he's been up to

lately.

Mike Maginnis: How were you first introduced to

Apple and their computers?

Bob Bishop: I saw an ad in a magazine back around 1975 for the Apple-1 computer. They only made about a

hundred of them or so, and I got interested in it, so I

went up to Palo Alto and I knocked on Steve Jobs' door.

He wasn't home at the time, but his mother and

stepfather were there and they expected him back any minute, so they had me come in and sit down. About

five minutes later, Steve came walking up and we got

introduced, he took me out to the garage in the back and

showed me the Apple-1. He had some trouble getting it

to work—he had a keyboard and a monitor and he would type some stuff in but he couldn't quite remember

how he was supposed to do stuff because Woz hadn't

quite showed him everything. But I saw enough to be

interested because I saw a lot of potential, so I ended up

buying one—not from him, but from another computer store that was being started in Southern California.

That's where I was living at the time, and one of my

friends was starting up a new computer store with a

couple of his associates. So I became their first

customer and bought an Apple-1 from them.

Maginnis: What drew you to the Apple as opposed to

the other hobbyist computers available back then, like

the Altair and the IMSAI?

Bishop: Well, the other machines had a minor flaw:

you had to put them together. You had to have a soldering iron and all kinds of stuff. Not that I was

adverse to that, because I used to do soldering and stuff

when I was at the University of Wisconsin. I worked in

the physics department as an undergraduate, and I

built amplifiers and things, but I just didn't feel like going through all that trouble to make a computer. I

wanted one that was already put together, and the

Apple-1 was the first one that came close. You wouldn't

call it put together by today's standards, though; it

was really just what you would call a motherboard today. You still had to get a power supply, case,

keyboard, monitor, and all the other stuff, but it was

still more put together than the Altairs and the IMSAIs

of those days.

Maginnis: According to your Web site, you created the first four graphics games for the Apple II in about

six months. That's a pretty amazing feat, especially

considering how new the machines were at the time.

Surely there weren't a whole lot of resources or

documentation available. What kind of challenges did that present for you?

Bishop: Those were the fun days. I wish that could

be the way it is today. I wish they made the iPhone with

the same philosophy with which they made the Apple II.

The Apple II was a completely self-contained computer: it had everything built in. You didn't have to go out and

buy a software development kit and another computer

to program it, like you do with the iPhone. Everything

you needed was in the Apple II, so it was a fun thing to

play around with. Plus it had a very limited amount of memory and limited capabilities; it wasn't too hard to

experiment and find out how to make it do things.

That's what I did. I got Apple II serial number 13, so I

didn't have too many predecessors competing with me.

One of the things I started playing with was hi-res graphics. There was absolutely zero documentation

about hi-res graphics, so I played with it and found out

what pixels turned on when I stored what hexadecimal

numbers at what locations, and I was able to put

together a map of the graphics screen, which was kind of bizarre. It wasn't linear; it was really screwed up, but

I somehow figured it all out and I started working on a

game. By the time the sun came up the next day, I'd

made the very first game, which I called Rocket Pilot.

Maginnis: You designed APPLE-TALKER and APPLE-LISTENER specifically to bring human speech

generation and recognition capabilities to the Apple II.

What was your motivation for doing so, and what

obstacles did you encounter?

Bishop: Well, that opens up another whole topic: the cassette ports. The cassette ports were originally

designed to store programs, so you could save and load


programs that you or somebody else wrote. The only

way you could load software into the computer was

through a cassette tape. That was the original philosophy behind the cassette ports, but I experi-

mented with them and found that they could do other

things. They worked by detecting zero crossings of a

sound wave. If you took a tape recorder, and you put in

anything—not just a program, but music—you could play the music into the cassette port, and if you sampled

the cassette port and toggled the built-in speaker in

phase with what was being seen on the cassette port,

you could actually hear the music coming through the

speaker. And that, of course, worked for human speech as well. But instead of just merely reproducing it

through the speaker, since it's a computer, you could

store that information in memory and play it back later.

So that was the birth of APPLE-TALKER. You could

record your voice into the computer then play it back later through the built-in speaker.

Maginnis: Tic-Tac-Dough was a famous game show

in the 1980s that used nine Apple II computers during

production. What was your involvement with that?

Bishop: CBS Television contacted me because they needed someone who knew how to write computer

programs for the Apple II. They had bought nine Apple

II computers that were supposed to run the monitors for

this new Tic-Tac-Dough game, and they had a master

(non-Apple) computer that was going to send com-munication signals to each of the Apples to tell them

what to display on the screens. They needed to put up a

giant 'X', a giant 'O', a dragon, the names of the

categories, whatever it is they wanted—somebody had

to do that. And so they elected me! It was a fun little thing. I'd never done anything in television before, so it

was my first chance to actually go behind the scenes

and see what goes on in a TV station.

Maginnis: How long did you work on that show?

Bishop: It was kind of a one-shot deal that lasted a few months. There wasn't that much to do—it was just

a matter of programming the computer to do what they

wanted. But it was fun because, as you know, when you

first write a program, it never quite works right the first

time, and even when you think you've got it debugged, it doesn't quite work. I remember we were doing the

prototype and the emcee, Wink Martindale, would say,

"Now, we'll look at the categories," and nothing would

happen. Who's to blame? Everybody's pointing the

finger at somebody else. Usually, it turned out it wasn't my fault, though!

Maginnis: It looks like you continued to use the

Apple II family all the way through the Apple IIGS.

Bishop: Yeah, I worked on the IIGS. I never got a

IIc, but I've done things on the IIc. I stayed with the Apple II and then into the III slightly. In fact, I was

there when the Apple III was being designed, which was

frustrating because they kept changing the design. I

was trying to write software, and they changed the

design so my software wouldn't work; I’d redo the software, and they'd change it again. Fortunately, the

Apple III never really caught on anyway, so it never

went anywhere. It was about that time the Apple

Macintosh group was starting to design their new

Macintosh computer.

Maginnis: Were you involved with the Macintosh

development at all?

Bishop: I refused to get involved. It wasn't my kind

of computer. See, the Macintosh computer was like the

iPhone of today, except it didn't have any of the whiz-bang features. The original Macintosh was a black and

white machine, compared to the Apple II, which had

color. The Apple II had six colors, at least. The

Macintosh was black and white. The Apple II, you could

program; the Macintosh, you couldn't program. It had no built-in programming capabilities. You had to buy all

the software from the company. It was totally, totally

the antithesis of what I wanted to work on. I don't want

to work on a computer if I can't program it—and the

Macintosh was not user-programmable. So I never got involved in the Macintosh and I never have since.

Maginnis: What are you doing these days?

Bishop: Well, I've done a lot of Internet games. You

may have heard of Internet riddles, online riddles. I did

the very first one of those. I created a game about six years ago called Cybertrek. It was an online adventure

game where you had to solve puzzles to get from one

Web page to the other, and that idea has since caught

on. Probably the most famous riddle wasn't one I devel-

oped, but that came after mine. It was a game called "This Is Not Pr0n", and that's what's always cited as an

example of an online riddle. But it came after mine.

I've done about fifteen or so online riddle games. I've

created a new programming language called SIMPLE,

which is based on the original Apple philosophy of hav-ing an easy to use programming language. I've been

teaching SIMPLE at several of the schools in the area.

I've written books, magazine articles, I've been a science

and technology radio talk-show host.

Visit Bob Bishop's homepage at

http://bob-bishop.awardspace.com/

MusinGS: Bob Bishop


Cover Story: KansasFest 2009

KansasFest 2009Twentieth annual convention "a part of history"

By Ken Gagne and Ivan Drucker

For more than thirty years, the Apple II has

consistently demonstrated a computer's potential,

defying public perception and redefining expectations.

For two of those three decades, the community it

has attracted has gathered in Kansas City to celebrate

the machine that changed their lives and to reconnect

with others who are proud of their devotion to Steve

Wozniak's brainchild.

KansasFest 2009, the twentieth annual Apple II

convention, was held July 21–26 at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri. Roughly three

dozen enthusiasts made up this year's roster. Whereas

last year was attended solely by domestic regulars, a

fifth of this year's KFesters had never attended the

conference before, and two from Germany served as its international representatives.

Tuesday

Historically, Tuesday was an optional early check-in

day that proved so popular, it was made an official part

of KansasFest. There were no sessions or workshops scheduled for this first day, allowing attendees to

arrive, unpack, and meet and greet at their leisure.

Carl Knoblock again organized his annual Peikop Endropov service, in which those flying to Kansas City

volunteer to share their rides to and from the airport,

while others made their own way by car, train, or

bicycle. Attendees who wandered into Rockhurst's

Xavier-Loyola residence hall before noon had plenty of time to unpack before the masses started showing up

later, with some folks not showing up until late in the

evening or even later in the week.

Once a critical mass was achieved, the geeks

caravanned to Sweet Tomatoes, an all-you-can-eat

restaurant that always accommodates the group's

diverse appetites. Afterward, some groups went shopping for groceries or forgotten computer parts,

while others returned to Rockhurst to finish setting up

their hardware in anticipation of the week to come.

Wednesday

The first half of Wednesday was open, allowing

KFesters to have breakfast, wander the campus, and get to know each other. Lunchtime quickly arrived, and

with it, the keynote speaker, Jason Scott, webmaster of

textfiles.com and creator of BBS: The Documentary. A

self-described archivist/historian who has charged

himself with preserving the stories of early computer users, Scott didn't need to wait for his keynote session

before finding an audience; as Kirk Mitchell and Ryan

Suenaga offered burgers and hot dogs from the KFest

Kookout, Scott lounged in the residence hall's common

area, sharing his experiences with a rapt audience.

It seemed a mere formality to move to the Student

Activities Center and officially turn the floor over to

Scott, who spoke for nearly an hour about the

relationships between people and computers and how

the two are changing, both separately and together. Scott noted that computers, in becoming an affordable

consumer product, have also become disposable.

"Buying an Apple II was like buying a car," he reflected

on the investment a personal computer once

represented. Parents would tell their kids, "You're going to learn to use this thing because we can't go to

Disneyland." But instead of offering escape to a fantasy

world, computers and modems opened up real worlds of

possibilities. "Families who may have never

communicated with people outside the state could now have their kids communicate nightly."

It is those communications, not the hardware on

which it occurred, that Scott is aiming to preserve.

"Computers don't get faster by themselves," he pointed

out. Instead, technological development can best be captured in human stories: "It helps you understand

why choices were made" and why things are the way

they are.

Scott also described his next project, a documentary

about text adventures—an inconceivable pastime in this age of 3D graphics. He described interactive fiction,

"You type something in and it tells you what

happened... We're in the period where there are people

who don't believe this happened." And changes

continue to occur: with the Internet making software


available for download to even the Nintendo Wii and

Xbox 360 game consoles, it will someday be seen as

quaint that we used to go to the store and buy a game in a box that couldn't be put near a magnet. Downloaded

software sometimes come with a digital depiction of box

art, but packaging will be a lost art, leaving digital

artifacts that need to be explained.

KansasFest attendees were familiar with this history but did not necessarily realize their continuing

place in it. "You are a part of history," Scott declared;

"Things you do here reverberate. History is not in the

data or printouts, but the friendships and phone calls or

emails ... Every time you boot up an Apple II, Woz smiles." Scott ended his speech by offering his audience

some advice: "Keep doing what you're doing—it's

important."

Scott was a tough act to follow, so the next session

kept it light as Ken Gagne demonstrated the link between classic Apple II games and modern Mac ones.

Many 8-bit entertainment titles, despite being decades

old, have been remade or have received sequels in

recent years, such as Lode Runner, Qix, and Choplifter,

which can now be played under the names Android, l1neum, and Chopper. In other cases, today's program-

mers are subtly influenced by the games they played as

children, as seen in games like Midnight Mansion and

Maelstrum's Mansion, which are reminiscent of

Montezuma's Revenge and Shadowgate, respectively.

The group adjourned for their first dinner at

Rockhurst's cafeteria before returning to the

presentation hall to hear Rob Walch of the Today in

iPhone podcast. A Kansas City resident, Walch

graciously presents at KFest each year on the state of Apple's iPhone, marking its progress from its launch in

2007 to the iPhone 3G model in 2008 and the iPhone

3GS, just a month old at the time of KFest 2009. Walch

reviewed the predictions he'd made last year and which

of them came true, though not always on the timetable he'd estimated. Despite its name, the iPhone 3GS offers

no emulation of the Apple IIGS; Walch nonetheless

dubbed the hardware of 3GS an improvement over its

predecessor, but since the third revision of the firmware

is available to both models, it may not be worth an upgrade for existing users.

The first day of official sessions complete, KFesters

retired to the dorms, where they caught up with old

friends and made new ones. Syndicomm and Gamebits

sponsored a pizza party which reminded the hosts how ravenous a herd of geeks can be. Knowing that KFest

had just begun, everyone was hungry for more.

Thursday

Due to a planned power outage, breakfast on

Thursday was delayed, offering KFesters some much-needed extra sleep. As a result, most attendees were

able to roll out of bed in time for the first presentation.

Ryan Suenaga demonstrated how a GPS device can be

used to enjoy the pastime of geocaching. By logging

onto a Web site and downloading geographic coordinates, players can find hidden trinkets and

treasure in their own backyard. "Not all caches are in

woods and off hiking trails," Suenaga emphasized,

proving his point by challenging his audience to find the

urban cache nearest to Rockhurst University. (Upon hearing this, Tony Diaz left the session early to pinpoint

the cache, returning in time to collect his prize from

Suenaga.)

Next up was Ivan Drucker, a first-time attendee and

former Apple employee, who showed off his favorite Apple II: a Macintosh equipped with a IIe card. Though

the card and the models of Macintosh with which it is

compatible are no longer being made, Drucker

presented them as an attractive choice for hobbyists

looking to bridge the gap between the Apple II and the Mac. (For more details in Drucker's own words, see

pages 15–16.)

The following session was by another first-time

KFester, Ferdinand Meyer-Hermann, who showed off a

card that wasn't vintage but was instead making its debut at that very moment. After reviewing how and

why the Apple II outputs video, Meyer-Hermann

demonstrated adapters for Apple IIe and IIc computers

to connect to VGA monitors, which are more common

than the RGB monitors for which the Apple II line was designed. The difference such a display boost gave to

Apple II games like Pac-Man and Airheart was evident.

The audience was wowed by the depth and breadth of

technical knowledge this newcomer brought to

KansasFest and was eager for his hardware to be finalized and mass produced.

After lunch, Ken Gagne took the stage with a

session that practically presented itself. Steve "Woz"

Wozniak, the inventor of the Apple II, had competed on

the television show Dancing With the Stars earlier in 2009. His appearances had spanned several weeks, but

Gagne, with some help from YouTube, had compiled all

the various episodes into a continuous 45-minute reel.

As most of the KFest audience had not followed the

show when it first aired, they enjoyed seeing their hero challenge himself in this unusual arena.



Next, Eric "Sheppy" Shepherd's hijacked his own

session on toolbox programming to debut Sweet16 v2.0,

the Apple IIGS emulator that has been in open beta for the last several years. v2.0 (which has since been up-

dated to v2.1.3) introduced improved TCP/IP network-

ing, CD-ROM support, analog and digital game input

devices, clipboard integration, and more. Afterward,

Shepherd returned to his scheduled topic, reviewing the various tools available to Apple IIGS programmers.

The sessions continued after dinner, starting with a

return appearance by Ryan Suenaga, who this time

reviewed various application programming interfaces,

or APIs, available to developers who want to write software that talks to different Web sites. Suenaga's

hope was that Apple II programs could be created that

retrieve and display requested data in real time, such as

weather or stock reports. To demonstrate that

possibility, Suenaga released both his own software that interfaces with Web sites such as Twitter, as well as the

Pascal source code that other programmers can use as

templates for their own utilities.

Although most of the crowed adjourned for the

evening, Paul Zaleski attracted a devoted few who watched as he cracked open a desktop Mac mini and

upgraded the hard drive and RAM, offering the

adventurous hardware hacker an affordable alternative

to paying a qualified technician to do the same job.

With another full day of sessions looming, KFesters knew they would need their sleep—but the

conversations, games, and fun continued well into the

night, with one group organizing a 3 AM caravan to a

Steak 'n Shake restaurant that was delayed en route by

a faulty trunk and a flat tire. While waiting for roadside repairs, the hungry KFesters posed a mock

accident photo shoot. It was all fun and games—until

police responded to an erroneous report of a three-car

pile-up with two dead bodies.

Friday

After Friday breakfast, the first session was a

Juiced.GS focus group. Editor and publisher Ken

Gagne briefly reviewed the magazine's history and

content before asking the audience for their opinion

about possible layout, format, and content changes. Scheduling an audience-participatory event for first

thing in the morning was perhaps not the best idea, but

those who attended had some valuable ideas that Gagne

would evaluate for Juiced.GS's 2010 volume, which he

announced during this time slot.

For the next session, Martin Haye employed the

week's most impressive presentation technique. Instead

of relying on Microsoft PowerPoint, as many presenters do, Haye instead used what he dubbed

"WeaknessPoint": using the Apple II's 40-column text,

he quickly and accurately typed his prepared notes onto

the screen, in effect making slides on the fly. It was an

effective pairing with the session's topic, which was how to use the 8-bit equivalent of the programming tools

normally found in the IIGS system monitor.

Eric Shepherd continued the programming theme

with his own session. After announcing several new

products available from Syndicomm to aide the aspiring programmer, Shepherd then took programming-related

questions from the audience, providing thorough

answers with which to inspire tomorrow's developers.

After lunch, Bruce Baker maintained his annual

tradition of inviting KFesters to join him in reviewing and playing his favorite Softdisk games. The most time

was spent with Saxe Palatin, a Hammurabi-type game

found on Softdisk issue #163.

In contrast to Baker's leisurely session, Geoff Weiss

next gave a technical presentation. Since many Apple II users are familiar with emulators, Weiss expanded that

concept by reviewing VirtualBox, virtualization software

that lets users run one operating system, such as

Windows, inside another OS, such as Linux.

Stavros Karatsoridis' next session was a fun example of a decades-old feature of the Apple II that

most people still don't know about. Apple's

SuperPILOT language was designed to give teachers an

easy way to teach students about programming concepts

more complex than those available in LOGO. As the audience watched, Stavros wrote some simple programs

in SuperPILOT, which is available as a stand-alone

product from Syndicomm.

Although the next session was the week's briefest, it

was also perhaps the most profound. Vince Briel, creator of the Apple-1 replica, had arrived at

KansasFest that morning with a working prototype of a

new hardware product; unsure if there would be enough

commercial interest to warrant finalizing the card, he

used his session to demonstrate its potential and gauge the audience's reaction. Judging from the attendee's

stunned looks and impressed expletives, Briel seems to

have gotten his answer. By year's end, he hopes to

make available a hardware-based MP3 player for the

Apple II. Using this expansion card, an Apple II can



play MP3 music files stored on a separate USB storage

device. Any software, from a dedicated MP3 player to

the soundtrack of a new game, could take advantage of this card if designed to do so. After answering many

questions from intrigued witnesses, he took one final

question that summed up the audience's response: "How

are you so awesome?"

Finally it was time for a KansasFest tradition: the banquet. Dressed in their finest and geekiest apparel,

KFesters sat down to a formal dinner, followed by the

results of the annual tie contest. Vince Briel was again

an audience favorite, this time with a tie equipped with

a working LED '][' symbol.

Master of ceremonies Ken Gagne then presented the

annual roast. Historically a well-intentioned lampoon

of an Apple II celebrity, this event has in recent years

adopted a broader, but no less humorous, focus. This

year's roast was a slideshow that adopted the Internet meme known as lolcats, but with a KansasFest twist:

pictures of past and present attendees, enhanced with

amusing and poorly spelled captions. Although some of

the jokes were a bit hard to decipher, attendees laughed

to see themselves and their friends on the big screen, all set to a soundtrack of Weird Al Yankovic.

After posing for a group photo outside the residence

hall, the group was free to enjoy the evening. Several

geeks made the requisite pilgrimage to the Apple Store,

which entertained the KansasFest delegation by having them pose for pictures with a giant prop iPhone.

Later that night, a videoconference session was

attempted with KansasFest's Australian counterparts

(see pages 11–14), who were midway through their

Saturday sessions. Unfortunately, a slow network on the American side resulted in many aborted attempts

before a working but brief connection was established.

Overall, it was a good day to be a KFester... and

there was still more to come.

Saturday

For the first time in roughly a dozen years,

KansasFest attendees had to choose between two tracks

of concurrent sessions. In the residence hall, Vince Briel

conducted a workshop in which five KFesters assembled

their own working Apple-1 replica machines. Sold as a kit of 88 component parts, the group had the help of the

kit's creator in soldering and testing a machine that

they could then call their own.

Meanwhile, three sessions were held in the Student

Activities Center. For the second day in a row,

KansasFest opened with an audience-participatory session. Ryan Suenaga put A2Unplugged back on the

airwaves with a live recording of his podcast.

Interviewing audience members Andy Molloy, Eric

Shepherd, and Kirk Mitchell, the episode's cast

reviewed the week's happenings, discussed favorite presentations, and agreed that the number and

diversity of sessions, even those not directly related to

the Apple II, made for an enjoyable week.

Following Ryan, Ivan Drucker demonstrated his

enhancement to an early epic computer adventure, Time Zone, which, when released in 1982, used a single disk

drive, despite coming on six double-sided disks. Drucker

modified Time Zone to run without swapping disks or

sides by using a 13-drive Apple II, real or emulated. It

was a clever hack, but Tony Diaz good-naturedly one-upped Ivan by showing off his own solution: a copy of

the Time Zone disks loaded into an obscure, vintage

floppy cartridge/changer system.

After Ivan, Jon Lipp talked about the GPS products

made by his employer, Garmin, briefly reviewing the history of the company and their ease-of-use design

philosophy. Lipp also demonstrated one of their latest

models of handheld GPS navigation computers.

After lunch, Geoff Weiss offered his reasons for

using OpenSolaris, an open source operating system for modern PCs. Geoff enthusiastically demonstrated its

features, such as support for the ZFS format,


Fast typer: Martin Haye presents his session, one character at a time. Photo courtesy Ryan Suenaga.


explaining, "I like to evangelize this like Mac users

evangelize the Macintosh."

Next was Eric Shepherd's third session—another which he took on a slight detour by briefly revisiting

Sweet16 v2.0 to show off some features he'd overlooked

the previous day. He then announced the release of two

freeware New Desk Accessories for the IIGS that offer

online functionality similar to what Ryan Suenaga proposed in his Thursday session.

Though the official schedule indicated the next

session would be a demonstration of the Carte Blanche

expansion card, the prototype at KansasFest proved

unready for prime time. Tony Diaz filled the slot by showing the methods he's used to restore Apple II

hardware, now yellowed with age, to its original gray.

A last lunch at Rockhurst preceded the vendor fair,

at which merchants and attendees offered their

merchandise, new and old, for sale or trade. Anyone who bought a Juiced.GS 2010 product was entered into

a drawing to win the GS RAM card reviewed in the last

issue; Vince Briel, the card's developer, randomly chose

Stavros Karatsoridis as the winner. That's when the

event committee belatedly realized that the previous night's banquet had not given away a prize for best door

sign. Mark Frischknecht, a first-time attendee, won for

reproducing an Arkanoid theme using floppy disks in

colored sleeves. His prize was a copy of the

documentary Welcome to Macintosh, autographed by Briel, who is featured on the DVD.

HackFest, a programming contest that challenges

contestants to write cool Apple II programs while at

KansasFest, was then judged. Margaret Anderson came

in third with a HyperCard-based disk cataloging utility, with second place to Martin Haye and a low-res paint

program. The winner was Peter Neubauer, who

implemented Conway's Game of Life (see page 10).

After all the wares were put away, KansasFest

assembled for one last group outing: dinner at Jack Stack. This barbecue chain unique to Kansas City was

chosen over the usual venue of K.C. Masterpiece after

the latter offered several years of declining service. But

nobody realized the impact KansasFest's business could

have: a few days after they snubbed the traditional restaurant, K.C. Masterpiece announced they were

going out of business.

From Jack Stack, the group split into three groups:

some returned to Rockhurst, a few went contra dancing,

and the majority went to see the new Star Trek film. As geeky a film as has ever been shown at KansasFest,

Star Trek attracted more KFesters than usual, including

Ryan Suenaga, who almost never opts for the movie

outing; Eric Shepherd, who'd already seen the film twice

in theaters; and Ken Gagne, the only moviegoer in the theater to be wearing a Starfleet uniform.

Hailing frequencies closed well after midnight,

leaving a tired party to return to Rockhurst—either to

get one last night's sleep, or to stay up all night and

catch an early flight home.

Sunday

The last day of KansasFest was as always a

melancholy one. Computers were packed, solder stored,

and hands shaken as friends new and old departed each

hour. Rides to the airport were coordinated by Carl Knoblock, with some late flights giving carpoolers time

enough to enjoy another restaurant outing.

Though nobody wanted to leave, most KFesters

knew they'd be back. As Martin Haye, a first-time

attendee, said later, "KansasFest was a blast—they'd have to lock me up to keep me away from next year's

KFest!"

KansasFest 2010 will be held July 20–25 at Rockhurst University. Learn more at

http://www.kansasfest.org/

For a song: Vince Briel shows off his MP3 card, promising new levels of audio capabilities for all Apple II users. Photo courtesy Ryan Suenaga.


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